The Taxpayers’ Union believes that questions need to asked about why a lobby group, working with the Maori Party on a political campaign around tobacco plain packaging, is largely taxpayer funded. This morning’s front page of the New Zealand Herald covers the latest efforts to build political pressure to introduce a plain packaging law.

Taxpayers’ Union Executive Director, Jordan Williams, says, “While civil servants operate under a duty of political neutrality, the Ministry of Health and others are awarding substantial sums of taxpayer money to health and environmental lobby groups to push particular political agendas.”

“It is wrong for special interest groups such as ASH to be using taxpayer money for political campaigns. ASH’s factual inaccuracies about the impact of plain packaging on smoking consumption in Australia suggests that they are operating outside any of the usual public sector control requiring balanced and evidenced based public statements.”

According to ASH’s most recent annual return filed with the Charities Register, more than 90% of ASH’s funding comes from the taxpayer.

Mr Williams says, “We all support funding for front line and addiction services such as Quitline. What we don’t support is funding to political organisations to operate campaigns with taxpayer money.”

An attack on Action on Smoking and Health is being described as same movie, different scenery by a Maori tobacco control advocate whose organisation was silenced after attacks by a tobacco industry-funded blogger.

The Taxpayers Union says it’s unfair that ASH, which gets more than 90 percent of its funding from the taxpayer, is working with the Maori Party on a political campaign around tobacco plain packaging.

Shane Bradbrook says it looks similar to the sort of pressure that came on his group Te Ao Marama from the Whale Oil blog, which led to it losing its Health Ministry funding.

He noted a Taxpayers Union co-founder is blogger and National Party pollster David Farrar.

Mr Farrar, the Taxpayers Union and Whale Oil’s Cameron Slater all feature in Nicky Hager’s book Dirty Politics about the use of blogs to attack critics of National or its policies.

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.